In earlier generations, the social organization of the family was such as to result in the exposure of young children to older relatives outside their immediate family as a natural consequence of repeated personal contact and interaction. Thus, in a typical situation, a family would become established in a given locale, and as the children of this family matured, they would create new families which would in turn settle nearby, and the individuals throughout this family chain would have frequent, virtual day to day, contact with one another so that the younger members would from this natural process acquire a definite understanding of their role in the extended family chain and their relationship to more remote members of that chain.
With the increased mobility of society in current times, mainly as a result of almost universal access to the automobile, the pattern of earlier days rarely is followed; in distinct contrast, the tendency is for children of a given root family to create their own families in areas distant from the root family. Therefore, the families of later generations tend to evolve in a more or less isolated state with at most only occasional personal contact with immediate family members of earlier generations and even less contact with more distant family members. Indeed, this tendency is so pronounced in modern society that social observers have coined the phrase "nuclear family" to connote the isolated self-contained condition of modern families. As a consequence of this different social pattern, the children of such "nuclear families" have little exposure to family members of earlier generations and, therefore, have little opportunity to develop a clear understanding of how the members of a family chain are related, the real meaning of such relationship and how they personally fit into this chain.